


No Greater Good

by scioscribe



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-09
Updated: 2013-05-09
Packaged: 2017-12-10 21:45:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/790498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What happened?”  Will is scrupulous in his attention to injury, as though he will swipe the pendulum across Hannibal’s hand and trace the story back.</p><p>As though, if he understood which route to take, he would empathize with Hannibal the way he empathizes with everyone.  Hannibal does not want to be another part of Will Graham’s everyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Greater Good

**Author's Note:**

> Hannibal's "memory" line towards the end is reused/repurposed from _The Silence of the Lambs._

Doubt has always run through Hannibal’s fingers like sand, but lately, he has come to think differently of the metaphor: he has come to believe that it implies there is still grit in the creases of his palms. As though it is something he loses but can never fully shake away. He despises imprecise language.

Will presses his face against teacups and lets steam rise from them and cloud his glasses: what seems like childishness is really just one more way to avoid eye contact. If Hannibal wanted to, he could wipe his thumb across the glass, smear a line through which Will could finally see him.

Instead, he pours more tea. Will has a cold, so Hannibal has brought slices of lemon and a small china container of honey. Will taps it with his fingernail three times before he disperses it into his tea in long swirls of hazy gold and then he squeezes the juice from the lemon and sets the pulped wedge beside his cup on the saucer. Will, for all his plaid and layers of oatmeal-colored sweaters, is precise. He drinks, smiles—Hannibal can see the muscles in his throat relax slightly—and says, “You’ve never been sick in all the time I’ve known you.”

All the time Will has known Hannibal has been one year and fourteen days.

Hannibal does not often fall ill; he has always considered sickness, like weakness, to be reserved for others. He wonders, vaguely, whether he will catch Will’s cold.

*

Whenever Will is away, Hannibal goes over and feeds his dogs. It’s quite a drive, really, and sometimes it is on the tip of his tongue to ask if Will can’t make more convenient arrangements.

The dogs snuffle wet noses against his knees as he measures their kibble precisely. It occurs to him, as he stands there with Winston’s ear bent in two against his leg, with the chaos of dogs whining and scratching at the floor, that it has been some time—months, really—since he has brought over his own food for them. Once the kibble is in the bowls and the dogs’ snouts are poked inside, Hannibal goes out. He leaves the light on and walks, all canine companions tucked back in the house, which really does seem, from a distance, to float on the field.

He goes back inside. He threads Will’s comb through his hair, looks in the mirror, and doesn’t quite recognize himself. Out of spite—and he hates to be motivated by something so petty—he drives Will’s nail scissors into the fleshy heel of his hand until blood wells out in a glossy dimple. It is bruised for days.

“What happened?” Will is scrupulous in his attention to injury, as though he will swipe the pendulum across Hannibal’s hand and trace the story back.

As though, if he understood which route to take, he would empathize with Hannibal the way he empathizes with everyone. Hannibal does not want to be another part of Will Graham’s everyone.

“Hannibal,” Will says. He’s leaning forward, his eyes on Hannibal’s hand. 

“Nothing happened,” Hannibal says. “Merely an accident. Nothing that will make any difference.”

*

He makes black sausage because sometimes the familiar is comforting, and when it comes to this particular dish, he has no surprises.

“A little simple,” Will says, “for someone of your tastes.”

“Sometimes the simplest things are the best.”

“You don’t really believe that,” Will says. He laughs a little. “I’ve seen your suits.”

People have, in the past, mistaken Hannibal’s eyes for a brown that borders on red, the color of dried blood, but it is Will whose eyes are open wounds.

Hannibal cuts off another bite of sausage. “I believe it more and more of late.” 

Sometimes, he thinks about how Will would feel if he knew what he has consumed at Hannibal’s table over their long acquaintance, and his skin feels strangely tight around his bones. The dry and almost rusty sound of Will’s laugh, the sideways slant of his smile, the jokes that he aims in Hannibal’s direction so only he will notice them—he finds it oddly distracting to think of losing those things.

He imagines the taste of Will’s tongue with a sort of dry-mouthed thrill.

But Will is white cotton T-shirts and dogs that lick Hannibal’s fingertips. He does not see how all of those things can be sustained with his wishes fulfilled.

He has, perhaps, grown too intimate, in this single case, to have his balance correct.

*

There are four dead young men in Seattle, strangled to death with barbed wire and left tied to telephone poles. Will takes his glasses on and off and then tugs his tie away from his throat and takes it off. His hands are shaking.

Hannibal, without being asked, puts Will’s tie in his pocket, where it stays coiled all day like a snake basking in the sun.

“He resents them,” Will says. “They’re—they’re not like him, they’re out in the open, so he, he ties them there. Leaves them. I—I’m surprised they’re not gutted, it would fit… he must be weak, physically—injured. He drugs them—the blood test—it’s hot, is anyone else hot?”

“I’ll find you a cold drink,” Hannibal says. He buys a Coca Cola from a street vendor—high sugar content, caffeine, ice—and walks it back to Will, who uses it to swallow down his aspirin before forgetting it in Jack Crawford’s hands and wandering off. His shadow makes uncanny shapes against the pavement. He is correct about it being very warm, unseasonably so.

There are garden-variety opiates in the bodies of the victims. A fifth appears, choked until the wire cut through his trachea and exposed the spine, suggesting increasing strength—a temporary injury, Will theorizes, or a recurring ailment, something cyclical.

“He looks like you,” Hannibal says. “Have you noticed?”

“Of course I’ve noticed,” Will says. He claws restlessly at the hotel room bedspread. It is cheap, flowered, and mildly tacky, somehow overbearing against the collapsing cleanness of Will’s mind.

Hannibal says, “Though the eyes are lighter than yours, in all cases.” He doesn’t know what makes him say it, and he does not like that level of uncertainty, but Will smiles, a little vaguely, and rubs at his forehead.

“You hold me together,” he says, but all Hannibal can think about is how he wanted, once, to tear Will completely apart.

The perpetrator had popped his shoulder out of joint shortly before the first and most thoroughly planned murder; by the time he is under arrest, his sling is stored in his dresser drawer, and he is able to flay half the skin from Will’s shoulder with a handful of barbed wire. Hannibal sits in the hospital room with his lips inflexibly rigid, thinking of Abigail Hobbs, and around two in the morning, reaches out to hold Will’s hand.

Will stirs. The white of the bandage next to his face, swathed in shadow, catches all the light in that dim room. He licks his lips and says, “You stayed.”

“Yes,” he says. He can hear the blood echoing in his ears like air inside conch shells. “But you should not. Jack Crawford will use you up like a pack of matches, striking fire from you until there is nothing left. He will not mean to, or else he will think he is doing it for the greater good, but what I know, Will, is that there is no greater good. There is no upside, and you are not that remarkable. Without you here, Crawford catches the assailant, with my assistance, or Dr. Bloom’s. It makes no difference, except to your state of mind.”

Will swallows. “You think I should leave?”

“I think there are boat engines to fix.”

“I can’t just walk away.”

“No one suggested walking. I recommended running, as quickly as possible, to a place that is—safer for you.”

Will has known, for one year and fifty-eight days, to listen to him, and to trust him implicitly.

So it comes: he stands awkwardly in Hannibal’s office, a week later, a suitcase in his hand, and says, “I—ah. I’ll write. You probably have—stationery, and calligraphy, not email, and I—I’ll write, you’ll write?”

“I will write,” Hannibal says, “provided you send me your address.”

He does not want to commit too fully to his kinder impulses. He wants, always, to have Will within reach, like a dog still leashed, though it no longer eats from the hand.

But Will sends postcards rather than letters and Hannibal finds nothing he wants to say in response that is appropriate. His vigor returns. He makes dinner for Jack Crawford, for Beverly Katz, for Alana Bloom. He likes, before he falls asleep on those nights, to imagine Will sunburnt, silhouetted against a flat, pellucid sea. The taste of salt and elegant sauces, in one memorable case exquisitely flavored with ginger and lime, lingers on his tongue.

*

The next time he sees Will is four years later, and there is a pane of cloudy plastic between them.

“Sunburned and windburned,” Hannibal says. “You look as though you haven’t seen the inside of a house since you left us. I of course no longer precisely recall the sky.”

“Blue,” Will says.

“What a detailed description. A pleasure to have a visitor with such an artistic eye.”

“That’s me,” Will says, nodding at a drawing Hannibal has on the wall. “From four years ago.”

“Memory, Will, is what I have instead of a view.”

“Jack Crawford thinks that you sent me away because you thought I’d find you out,” Will says. “But based on Miriam Lass, I think you would have killed me. That would have been—more in-line with your, ah, demonstrated behavior patterns.”

“Exceptions are the product of a well-developed psychology.”

Will walks closer. “Why was I your exception?”

He was a man dying of smoke inhalation inside a building Hannibal had set alight, there was no elegance to it, no design, as Will would once have said. He was familiar enough that Hannibal owned the lines of his body through memory alone—the picture of Will is, indeed, astonishingly accurate. He was hurt, too, in the end, it is in his eyes, dark as bruises and old blood—it could be construed that Will Graham, alive, untouched, is his masterpiece because he lives, not despite it. It could be said that it would have been counterproductive to kill him or to watch him slowly ground down under the stones that were the bodies and responsibilities of and to the dead.

“It was a very long time ago,” Hannibal says. “I’m afraid I do not recall.”

Will nods. He touches the wall between them, but it is not a film—there is no singular image to be captured, and his relationship with Will Graham has always been a slipshod series of sensations, not anything so unified as a touch—and so Hannibal does not rise to meet him there, to press his hand against the shape of Will’s, to feel that phantom warmth. He kept Will’s tie from their last case together and it smelled of bargain aftershave which took a long time to fade away.

When Will leaves, the smudge of his hand is still on the plastic.

Hannibal watches as it dissolves.


End file.
